Americans will not (and should not) give up the safety, comfort, and utility benefits of a large vehicle just because a bunch of effete Europeans use their socialist governments to force tiny little crapboxes on their citizenry.
Of course, while you may feel safer in a SUV, accident records show they're actually more dangerous.
But I'm all for letting people drive what they want. Just so we don't subsidize it with socialistic government handouts to pay for the high costs of providing the highways, streets, and low gasoline prices. And as a bonus, then we could tell the oil-producing states to kiss off, instead of having to either suck up to them or invade them. Because I think allowing drivers to pay the *full* cost of those things at the pump is the thing that would increase fleet efficiency.
If an auto company could make their cars any more efficient, they most certainly would. It's a rather competitive industry, and fuel economy is a major selling point.
Of course auto companies could make their cars more efficient. Just making them smaller and lighter would make them more efficient, with no new technology whatsoever. If fuel economy was all that much a selling point, SUVs and pickups would have remained specialty vehicles, observed mostly at worksites and in remote areas.
Let's take one of the least efficient vehicles as an example. The Hummer. Ok, let's shrink it down a bit, mostly I see them with one person in them, so let's say to the size of a VW Golf. So it wouldn't need anywhere near as big an engine, would weigh less, have less rolling resistance, less aerodynamic drag. Why, they could probably get the fuel efficiency up from 10mpg to 40mpg, a 4X improvement! Sales would certainly skyrocket! Yeah, right.
I expect there's nothing wrong with this equation that wouldn't be cured by including in the gas tax the cost of all highway/road/street construction, operation, maintenance, environmental costs, costs of military adventures to keep the oil supply open, etc. If we did those things, I wouldn't be driving a vehicle that gets around 15mpg.
send a personal check or a US postal money order But you're not in Romania. The thing about credit cards is, they provide currency exchange. Ask your nice bank what they're going to charge you for depositing a check written in leu (Romanian currency). Probably $30 or so.
in the US there isn't any fee for depositing checks, just writing them Not true. Most business accounts charge fees for depositing checks, too. But it's not as big a fee as the credit card company gets for those transactions.
Just because you were allowed to do it doesn't make it a right - that's a common problem with a lot of people who post on Slashdot - they can't tell the difference between a right and a privilege.
We look to the glorious future, the removal of uncertainty, the time when everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden. For after all, the "rights" you have are made explicit in law. Anything else is merely "privilege".
Unfortunately, Fair Use permits certain activities as a right, not merely a privilege. So Fair Use must go, we must abolish it. It is rediculous to think that a citizen has the "right" to view a TV show at a time other than the time the producer wishes it to be seen at. The citizen's only "right" in this matter is the right to purchase the products advertised in the show.
Unlike you, our founding fathers were not socialist.
Right on, brother! What pisses me off is this socialist road-building, subsidizing the construction, operation, and maintenance of highways and roads. (No crap about gas tax, that tax isn't anywhere near enough to pay for building roads, maintaining bridges, having cops patrol them, paying for the meat wagon to go out and scrape idiots up off of them, cleaning up 100% of the pollution and runoff caused by the users, etc.)
Not to speak of spending billions attacking other countries that haven't done anything to us, to nail down the oil supply for gasoline for the morons who don't want to pay the full costs of driving their Hummers to work. Loonies want to attack Iraq, let 'em buy an M16 and a ticket and do it on their own dime.
You mean like the guys at Enron who thought that they were so smart that they could write their own rules and would never get caught?
And of those hundreds or thousands of people who worked for Enron (not only top execs who masterminded crimes, but the traders and other foot soldiers who carried them out), how many are doing time today? How many have even been charged?
Where the street criminals are stupid is, they're liable to do long hard time for something that nets them a few hundred bucks. But they're working class criminals, they don't have the suits or connections to do crime wholesale. Enron traders made a bundle with essentially zero risk (maybe a couple of the top guys will do a few years, but considering the amount of money involved, it was a good gamble even if they did get caught; no traders have even been charged). Halliburton execs just pay a small penalty as cost of doing business with the government, and double the amount of overcharge on the next contract to make up for it. Try a google for "price fixing". Qwest. Tyco. Adelphia. Vivendi Universal. AOLTimeWarner. Samsung. Bayer. DuPont...
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
--Woody Guthrie
If you use a copy of commercial software you didn't pay for, you are a PIRATE. That's all there is to it. You can be a VERY NAUGHTY pirate if you copy cd's on floating pirate ships, but the individual user is still a pirate.
I prefer to call them "privateers". Wasn't that the official US term for people like John Paul Jones, who the British called "pirates"? Or maybe "freedom fighters".
Now, companies that fix prices of CDs and thus steal from the consumer, who cook the books and steal from their investors and their artists, who stop paying royalties to artists (even well-known ones) because they claim they can't locate them, who engage in illegal and anticompetitive business practices, well, "pirate" doesn't quite fit, it's a bit too romantic, don't you think "organized crime" is better?
Set aside some money for lawyers. Somebody's already tried that business model (though I don't think they limited themselves to spammer 800 numbers), and got caught (I couldn't locate a link to the story, but I remember reading it). IIRC they're doing time & charges now.
Is my only weapon having a bunch of friends call this 800 number to make the company's overseas toll-free phone bill unbearable?
Do remember that the recipient of an 800 call gets your phone number reported to them.
Calling from a pay phone will prevent you from receiving phone-spam (or legal) retribution.
In the US, calling from a pay phone has an additional benefit: the recipient is charged ~$0.35 per call to compensate the owner of the pay phone for the money you're not putting in. So if you don't get the information you need the first time, keep calling back until you do.
I went to High School in the seventies, the class valedictorian was by far the most respected student there.
Maybe it depends on the particular school. I went to HS in a rural area in the '60s, and it sure wasn't true there. It wasn't that kids got beat up (that was more in Junior High, ~7th grade), but the smart kids weren't particularly respected by the other students. Or most of the teachers, either, unless you sucked up to them. Gawd there were some awful teachers. Of course, maybe the music was to blame, there was Jerry Lee Lewis, and "Louie Louie" and the Beach Boys, and lewd singers who gyrated their hips and all.
So far, that Baystar, one of the major sources of financing for SCO, did so at the behest of Microsoft. (The other major source of funding is a Canadian bank acting for unnamed private parties.) And that, Mike Anderer, the consultant who is "S2" wrote a subsequently leaked memo discussing how SCO was obtaining >$80M in funding (mostly indirectly) from MS.
Because they can get away with it. They'd love to get rid of OT for everyone, but until they're able to, they pick around the edges... white-collar workers who're too independent to unionize and shut the place down are an easy target.
Because if they can reduce the problem to one-on-one negotiating, where one party is a single individual with a few grand in the bank, and the other party is a major corporation with dozens of lawyers and the ability to screw you on a whim, they know who's going to win that battle.
File sharing with P2P (non-centralized) systems is unlikely to 'give a spin' to a new artist
Actually, while not all P2P systems support browsing, it is very common to search for something you like, and then see what else that source has. If someone demonstrates their good taste by sharing two or three artists you really like, often the other stuff they have that you're not familiar with is worth checking out.
Likewise, while not all P2P systems support searching for metadata (e.g. genre, or instrument), some do, and you can discover new artists that way.
there is an effect, however small. If the study showed that listening to mp3s made people MORE LIKELY to buy a CD, then the study might help the napster community.
If you'd RTFA, you'd see that while the overall effect on CD sales is statistically equal to zero (1 sale lost/5000 downloads), the effect on the top 25% CDs is one added sale/150 downloads. The lost sales are suffered by the CDs that don't sell well in any case, the CDs that never turn a profit anyhow (most don't), and thus never pay their artists any royalties anyhow.
If we assume that there's any correlation between quality and sales (I know, a dangerous assumption), the lost sales accrue to CDs that were mostly crap to begin with, and the good artists benefit.
let's say you doused the [credit] card in some poison that is absorbed through touch, and will stick to the card long enough. What kind of liability does the bank accepting and transferring this object open them up to?
Even better, let's say you doused a $20 bill in poison and deposited it in the bank. You know, they don't burn all the cash that's deposited, they reuse it and hand it back out, without even cleaning it first (due to short-sighted laws against laundering money). Shocking, isn't it?
And I daresay paper currency will absorb your poison better than plastic credit card, too. Where it will mix with the cocaine residue, the gasoline contamination from people who've just filled their car, and the bacteria from people who didn't wash their hands after scratching that hemorrhoid itch, forming a lethal brew.
Your best bet for survival is to only accept coins, and to carry a blowtorch to sterilize them with before handling them.
If I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then send you a bill for it, that is fraud and/or extortion.
Fraud, maybe. But if I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then later tell you I'm not gonna work for you any more unless you pay me, that's just the breaks. If you don't like it, you don't use my services any more. It wasn't extortion when X-Drive said they weren't gonna be free anymore, and I'd have to pay them if I didn't want them to dump my files. It's not extortion when eFax tells me that I'm gonna have to pay them if I want to keep the fax number they've provided for years for free. How is this different?
If the sheriff wanted a SLA guarantee, he would have hired a commercial service. He got what he paid for. And if the sheriff wanted to own the domain, he should have gotten a.gov domain, unless he's selling justice he's got no business with a.com TLD anyhow.
Actually, the magnitude of a magnetic field drops away as the square of the distance from the source.
For a point source, it does. For a line source, it drops proportional to the distance. For a (relative to you) large plane, it doesn't drop at all. Granted, a point source probably approximates an electric razor, except at close range. (How far away do you hold your electric razor?) Old electric blankets had a large loop, not very good. Newer ones have the wire in pairs, so the field cancels out better (twisted pairs would be better yet, but probably lumpy). My house was wired sometime around when they invented electricity, before they had multiconductor cable, and sometimes the hot and neutral wires go by completely different routes (at least two circuits share the same neutral, too). So it's like living inside of an electric razor, I guess. Maybe I should connect a ground wire to my tinfoil hat.
But of course, I didn't advocate being impolite or antagonistic. Doing so is stupid. When you handle a rattlesnake, you should do so with great care. However, there's a difference between being considerate and polite because someone deserves it, and doing so because they're dangerous. A person, whether LEO or civilian, deserves consideration and politeness to the extent that they are considerate, respectful, and polite to you. An arrogant person, a person who throws his weight around, doesn't deserve squat, though it may be prudent to act like they do.
No, I didn't advocate spitting in his eye. That would be assault.
I thought the video was telling not so much because of the guy, but because of what the cops did to the woman who they believed was the victim of a domestic assault.
you will probably never meet on the street anyone with more power that the average police officer. On his summary judgement, he can deprive you of your liberty, property, even your life...
Now, why in the hell would anyone purposely and unnecessarily antagonize someone like that?
If what you're trying to say is, they should be treated with fear and distrust by anyone not in their particular social circle, you've made your point.
Presented with some staggering insurmountable pile of scientific evidence (eg, odds of matching DNA), they'll search out for a Mark Fuhrman and suggest to the jury that there's "reasonable doubt".
As long as we allow people like Mark Fuhrman to be cops, there will always be "reasonable doubt".
And it's not going to change until someone gets the guts to start bringing charges against cops and prosecutors who knowingly use false information, or withhold information.
remember we are at war - the war against terrorism.
We are also at war with freedom. Make no mistake about it, every move against terror that infringes on personal privacy and freedom is also a move against freedom.
They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans will not (and should not) give up the safety, comfort, and utility benefits of a large vehicle just because a bunch of effete Europeans use their socialist governments to force tiny little crapboxes on their citizenry.
Of course, while you may feel safer in a SUV, accident records show they're actually more dangerous.
But I'm all for letting people drive what they want. Just so we don't subsidize it with socialistic government handouts to pay for the high costs of providing the highways, streets, and low gasoline prices. And as a bonus, then we could tell the oil-producing states to kiss off, instead of having to either suck up to them or invade them. Because I think allowing drivers to pay the *full* cost of those things at the pump is the thing that would increase fleet efficiency.
If an auto company could make their cars any more efficient, they most certainly would. It's a rather competitive industry, and fuel economy is a major selling point.
Of course auto companies could make their cars more efficient. Just making them smaller and lighter would make them more efficient, with no new technology whatsoever. If fuel economy was all that much a selling point, SUVs and pickups would have remained specialty vehicles, observed mostly at worksites and in remote areas.
Let's take one of the least efficient vehicles as an example. The Hummer. Ok, let's shrink it down a bit, mostly I see them with one person in them, so let's say to the size of a VW Golf. So it wouldn't need anywhere near as big an engine, would weigh less, have less rolling resistance, less aerodynamic drag. Why, they could probably get the fuel efficiency up from 10mpg to 40mpg, a 4X improvement! Sales would certainly skyrocket! Yeah, right.
I expect there's nothing wrong with this equation that wouldn't be cured by including in the gas tax the cost of all highway/road/street construction, operation, maintenance, environmental costs, costs of military adventures to keep the oil supply open, etc. If we did those things, I wouldn't be driving a vehicle that gets around 15mpg.
send a personal check or a US postal money order
But you're not in Romania. The thing about credit cards is, they provide currency exchange. Ask your nice bank what they're going to charge you for depositing a check written in leu (Romanian currency). Probably $30 or so.
in the US there isn't any fee for depositing checks, just writing them
Not true. Most business accounts charge fees for depositing checks, too. But it's not as big a fee as the credit card company gets for those transactions.
Just because you were allowed to do it doesn't make it a right - that's a common problem with a lot of people who post on Slashdot - they can't tell the difference between a right and a privilege.
We look to the glorious future, the removal of uncertainty, the time when everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden. For after all, the "rights" you have are made explicit in law. Anything else is merely "privilege".
Unfortunately, Fair Use permits certain activities as a right, not merely a privilege. So Fair Use must go, we must abolish it. It is rediculous to think that a citizen has the "right" to view a TV show at a time other than the time the producer wishes it to be seen at. The citizen's only "right" in this matter is the right to purchase the products advertised in the show.
Unlike you, our founding fathers were not socialist.
Right on, brother! What pisses me off is this socialist road-building, subsidizing the construction, operation, and maintenance of highways and roads. (No crap about gas tax, that tax isn't anywhere near enough to pay for building roads, maintaining bridges, having cops patrol them, paying for the meat wagon to go out and scrape idiots up off of them, cleaning up 100% of the pollution and runoff caused by the users, etc.)
Not to speak of spending billions attacking other countries that haven't done anything to us, to nail down the oil supply for gasoline for the morons who don't want to pay the full costs of driving their Hummers to work. Loonies want to attack Iraq, let 'em buy an M16 and a ticket and do it on their own dime.
You mean like the guys at Enron who thought that they were so smart that they could write their own rules and would never get caught?
And of those hundreds or thousands of people who worked for Enron (not only top execs who masterminded crimes, but the traders and other foot soldiers who carried them out), how many are doing time today? How many have even been charged?
Where the street criminals are stupid is, they're liable to do long hard time for something that nets them a few hundred bucks. But they're working class criminals, they don't have the suits or connections to do crime wholesale. Enron traders made a bundle with essentially zero risk (maybe a couple of the top guys will do a few years, but considering the amount of money involved, it was a good gamble even if they did get caught; no traders have even been charged). Halliburton execs just pay a small penalty as cost of doing business with the government, and double the amount of overcharge on the next contract to make up for it. Try a google for "price fixing". Qwest. Tyco. Adelphia. Vivendi Universal. AOLTimeWarner. Samsung. Bayer. DuPont...
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
--Woody Guthrie
And another thing: all wealth ultimately goes to people. There is no such thing as a "rich company"; companies are owned by stock holders.
In the USA, companies (i.e. corporations) are considered to be persons. So of course all wealth goes to "people."
Besides, ultimately we're all dead. It's what goes on while we're waiting for the ultimate that concerns me.
If you use a copy of commercial software you didn't pay for, you are a PIRATE. That's all there is to it. You can be a VERY NAUGHTY pirate if you copy cd's on floating pirate ships, but the individual user is still a pirate.
I prefer to call them "privateers". Wasn't that the official US term for people like John Paul Jones, who the British called "pirates"? Or maybe "freedom fighters".
Now, companies that fix prices of CDs and thus steal from the consumer, who cook the books and steal from their investors and their artists, who stop paying royalties to artists (even well-known ones) because they claim they can't locate them, who engage in illegal and anticompetitive business practices, well, "pirate" doesn't quite fit, it's a bit too romantic, don't you think "organized crime" is better?
My new business model
Set aside some money for lawyers. Somebody's already tried that business model (though I don't think they limited themselves to spammer 800 numbers), and got caught (I couldn't locate a link to the story, but I remember reading it). IIRC they're doing time & charges now.
Is my only weapon having a bunch of friends call this 800 number to make the company's overseas toll-free phone bill unbearable?
Do remember that the recipient of an 800 call gets your phone number reported to them.
Calling from a pay phone will prevent you from receiving phone-spam (or legal) retribution.
In the US, calling from a pay phone has an additional benefit: the recipient is charged ~$0.35 per call to compensate the owner of the pay phone for the money you're not putting in. So if you don't get the information you need the first time, keep calling back until you do.
I went to High School in the seventies, the class valedictorian was by far the most respected student there.
Maybe it depends on the particular school. I went to HS in a rural area in the '60s, and it sure wasn't true there. It wasn't that kids got beat up (that was more in Junior High, ~7th grade), but the smart kids weren't particularly respected by the other students. Or most of the teachers, either, unless you sucked up to them. Gawd there were some awful teachers. Of course, maybe the music was to blame, there was Jerry Lee Lewis, and "Louie Louie" and the Beach Boys, and lewd singers who gyrated their hips and all.
what's the case against MS?
So far, that Baystar, one of the major sources of financing for SCO, did so at the behest of Microsoft. (The other major source of funding is a Canadian bank acting for unnamed private parties.) And that, Mike Anderer, the consultant who is "S2" wrote a subsequently leaked memo discussing how SCO was obtaining >$80M in funding (mostly indirectly) from MS.
That is bizarre, why are they targeting us?
Because they can get away with it. They'd love to get rid of OT for everyone, but until they're able to, they pick around the edges... white-collar workers who're too independent to unionize and shut the place down are an easy target.
Because if they can reduce the problem to one-on-one negotiating, where one party is a single individual with a few grand in the bank, and the other party is a major corporation with dozens of lawyers and the ability to screw you on a whim, they know who's going to win that battle.
File sharing with P2P (non-centralized) systems is unlikely to 'give a spin' to a new artist
Actually, while not all P2P systems support browsing, it is very common to search for something you like, and then see what else that source has. If someone demonstrates their good taste by sharing two or three artists you really like, often the other stuff they have that you're not familiar with is worth checking out.
Likewise, while not all P2P systems support searching for metadata (e.g. genre, or instrument), some do, and you can discover new artists that way.
there is an effect, however small. If the study showed that listening to mp3s made people MORE LIKELY to buy a CD, then the study might help the napster community.
If you'd RTFA, you'd see that while the overall effect on CD sales is statistically equal to zero (1 sale lost/5000 downloads), the effect on the top 25% CDs is one added sale/150 downloads. The lost sales are suffered by the CDs that don't sell well in any case, the CDs that never turn a profit anyhow (most don't), and thus never pay their artists any royalties anyhow.
If we assume that there's any correlation between quality and sales (I know, a dangerous assumption), the lost sales accrue to CDs that were mostly crap to begin with, and the good artists benefit.
let's say you doused the [credit] card in some poison that is absorbed through touch, and will stick to the card long enough. What kind of liability does the bank accepting and transferring this object open them up to?
Even better, let's say you doused a $20 bill in poison and deposited it in the bank. You know, they don't burn all the cash that's deposited, they reuse it and hand it back out, without even cleaning it first (due to short-sighted laws against laundering money). Shocking, isn't it?
And I daresay paper currency will absorb your poison better than plastic credit card, too. Where it will mix with the cocaine residue, the gasoline contamination from people who've just filled their car, and the bacteria from people who didn't wash their hands after scratching that hemorrhoid itch, forming a lethal brew.
Your best bet for survival is to only accept coins, and to carry a blowtorch to sterilize them with before handling them.
If I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then send you a bill for it, that is fraud and/or extortion.
.gov domain, unless he's selling justice he's got no business with a .com TLD anyhow.
Fraud, maybe. But if I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then later tell you I'm not gonna work for you any more unless you pay me, that's just the breaks. If you don't like it, you don't use my services any more. It wasn't extortion when X-Drive said they weren't gonna be free anymore, and I'd have to pay them if I didn't want them to dump my files. It's not extortion when eFax tells me that I'm gonna have to pay them if I want to keep the fax number they've provided for years for free. How is this different?
If the sheriff wanted a SLA guarantee, he would have hired a commercial service. He got what he paid for. And if the sheriff wanted to own the domain, he should have gotten a
[Insert ignorant redneck sheriff joke here]
You seem to be thinking of the electric field
:)
Actually, you're right, I was. Brain bubble.
Even so, my charm pulled me through with the mods
Actually, the magnitude of a magnetic field drops away as the square of the distance from the source.
For a point source, it does. For a line source, it drops proportional to the distance. For a (relative to you) large plane, it doesn't drop at all. Granted, a point source probably approximates an electric razor, except at close range. (How far away do you hold your electric razor?) Old electric blankets had a large loop, not very good. Newer ones have the wire in pairs, so the field cancels out better (twisted pairs would be better yet, but probably lumpy). My house was wired sometime around when they invented electricity, before they had multiconductor cable, and sometimes the hot and neutral wires go by completely different routes (at least two circuits share the same neutral, too). So it's like living inside of an electric razor, I guess. Maybe I should connect a ground wire to my tinfoil hat.
But of course, I didn't advocate being impolite or antagonistic. Doing so is stupid. When you handle a rattlesnake, you should do so with great care. However, there's a difference between being considerate and polite because someone deserves it, and doing so because they're dangerous. A person, whether LEO or civilian, deserves consideration and politeness to the extent that they are considerate, respectful, and polite to you. An arrogant person, a person who throws his weight around, doesn't deserve squat, though it may be prudent to act like they do.
No, I didn't advocate spitting in his eye. That would be assault.
I thought the video was telling not so much because of the guy, but because of what the cops did to the woman who they believed was the victim of a domestic assault.
you will probably never meet on the street anyone with more power that the average police officer. On his summary judgement, he can deprive you of your liberty, property, even your life...
Now, why in the hell would anyone purposely and unnecessarily antagonize someone like that?
If what you're trying to say is, they should be treated with fear and distrust by anyone not in their particular social circle, you've made your point.
Presented with some staggering insurmountable pile of scientific evidence (eg, odds of matching DNA), they'll search out for a Mark Fuhrman and suggest to the jury that there's "reasonable doubt".
As long as we allow people like Mark Fuhrman to be cops, there will always be "reasonable doubt".
at least one case where the FBI insured that an innocent man was convicted of murder and sent to prison in order to protect their own informant.
What case was that?
Joseph Salvati ABC News
A quick google turns up other probable cases.
And it's not going to change until someone gets the guts to start bringing charges against cops and prosecutors who knowingly use false information, or withhold information.
remember we are at war - the war against terrorism.
We are also at war with freedom. Make no mistake about it, every move against terror that infringes on personal privacy and freedom is also a move against freedom.
They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
All the channels I saw reported weapons found over those pesticides. Wasn't just Fox.
There IS a liberal bias in the media.
No, that would indicate that there was a rightwing bias in the media, if all the channels you saw were swallowing the rightwing line.
Liberal/conservative, right/left being relative matters, we can probably agree that Fox is way on one end of the spectrum, though.